Al-Ti-B master alloys are widely used in the aluminum industry as grain refiners for the control of the microstructure of the aluminum alloys. The SHS (self-propagating high-temperature synthesis) is an ex situ method that uses exothermic reactions to sustain the chemical reaction in a combustion wave. The advantages of SHS are the low energy requirement, simplicity and product purity. However, the raw material used has to be very pure, with a very small size leading to the necessity of a reactor with a protective gas to produce the reaction. The purpose of this investigation is to fabricate SHS master alloys with commercial standard raw materials, with lower purity and higher grain size without a reactor or protective gas in order to (1) decrease the price and (2) improve the productivity of master alloy manufacturing. The possibility of using cheap borated salts instead of expensive pure boron has been studied. Different compositions of aluminum master alloy have been developed. Bigger TiB₂ grain size has been obtained when using bigger commercial raw materials. Larger titanium powder can produce an aluminum master alloy with a maximum of 30% of aluminum without reactor. In comparison, SHS reaction is much more difficult when using finer titanium powder.

In this work, powders of cemented ultrafine WC-6 wt.% Co were consolidated. The feasibility of the medium frequency electrical resistance sintering (MF-ERS) technique were studied to prevent WC grain growth during consolidation. Porosity and hardness were measured at different zones of the MF-ERS compacts. The compacts showed a slight inhomogeneity in their properties across their section, but it was controlled by choosing suitable values of the processing parameters. The optimal values for the material studied were current intensities between 7 and 8 kA and sintering times between 600 and 800 ms. The main achievement using this consolidation method was that sintered compacts essentially maintained the initial WC grain size. This was attained to processing times of less than 2 s, and without the need for using protective atmospheres.